Call Your Folks! Android app a wake-up call to stay in touch

Call Your Folks! for your Android phone is an ideal app for the person who always means to call home, but seldom does.

There aren't enough hours in the day, life happens, time gets away from us — there are a whole bunch of different reasons to excuse us from calling those nearest and dearest: our friends and family. When it comes right down to it, though, this is pretty sad, especially given the fact that so many people spend hours per day playing around on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Call Your Folks! is an app that's designed to remind you to keep in touch with the friends and family you miss. It's set up to allow users to select contacts, and then specify how frequently they' like to converse with their mother, sister, best friend, grandma or old college roommate. You can pick intervals, ranging from one day to three months, and have multiple contacts stored at once. The app keeps tabs on your call log, and will alert you with a pop-up notification when it's been a while since you've last spoken to your dad.

What's nice is that the notification will stay up in the left-hand corner of your screen so you can't forget about it. This way, even if you don't have a free second presently, you'll remember to call when you do.

Set up pretty similarly to how your phone's stock alarm application is, there's not a whole lot to Call Your Folks! Just click the "Add a New Reminder" button to get started. Because it's got such a basic layout, though, using the app is an intuitive experience.

This app seems like an idea that's so simple, it feels almost like more people could have thought of this. I do admit, it does seem to suddenly fill a void in my life. I'm probably going to add even more contacts to my Call Your Folks! list.